a. Field of the Invention
The instant invention relates to the field of identification, and in particular to identification of baggage within a baggage handling system.
b. Description of Related Art
A barcode is a machine-readable representation of information, often having dark ink on a light background to create high and low reflectance which is converted to digitally comprehensible 1s and 0s. Originally, barcodes stored data in the widths and spacings of printed parallel lines, but today they also come in patterns of dots, concentric circles, and text codes hidden within images. Barcodes can be read by optical scanners called barcode readers or scanned from an image by special software. Barcodes are widely used to implement Auto ID Data Capture (AIDC) systems that improve the speed and accuracy of computer data entry. One deficiency of barcode is that the information is contained within the barcode itself.
At present, bar codes are one suggested method of tagging luggage, baggage, parcels, packages and the like (hereinafter collectively referred to as “baggage”) for security clearances, such as that performed at airports, train stations, or the like. However, such systems suffer from many of the problems discussed hereinthroughout, namely lack of associative information, very limited readability and reading range, loss of bar code tags, differing methodologies in bar coding, and the like. Other alternative methodologies for security clearance scanning, such as active and/or passive radio frequency (RF) tagging suffer many of the same drawbacks as mentioned with respect to bar coding, and additionally present issues with regard to the expense of generating unique tags, powering tags where applicable, high power or highly radiative interrogators and/or readers, etc. Further, such tags are typically not programmable, that is, information typically cannot be associated with such RF tags after such tags are created.
Therefore a need exists for a baggage tagging apparatus, method and system that does not contain personal information but that can be associated with identifying information, that can be read from increased distances and off-angles at low power, and that can be read through materials.